


Alphabet soup

by Cartonsofcartoons



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Civil War Team Iron Man, Gen, characters will be added, not team Cap friendly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 04:29:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15878568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cartonsofcartoons/pseuds/Cartonsofcartoons
Summary: Not that connected, teeny-tiny drabbles based on alphabetical self-prompts.





	Alphabet soup

A is for  **Addio**

 

It was a thing Tony did nowadays. He talked in Italian.

 

Bucky understood him, a remnant from his Winter Soldier days and sometimes the words Tony spoke made him smother laughter, sometimes they made him swallow and look at the floor unable to meet anyone’s eyes, even when those words weren’t addressed to him.

 

Natalia understood as well. She understood and refused to translate for any of them. Said it was better that way and smiled a sad smile. There was a time Sam would have accepted that as an answer. Now he asked Bucky if he wouldn’t mind translating and found his suspicions were right. Stark didn’t say anything half as bad as Natalia made it out to be. Nothing they didn’t deserve to hear.

 

The others made a fuss about it, complaining, threatening, whining. It changed nothing, of course.

 

And Steve...Steve didn’t understand everything Tony said. But he knew some fragmented words. Things he’d learnt from his neighbourhood, words thrown around, some he learnt from Howard, some he learnt from other soldiers.

 

He knew enough to understand and flinch when the rest always got a cheerily sarcastic ‘Addio’ and he got a pointed by similarly cheery and not at all sarcastic ‘Sparisci’, instead.

 

( **Note** :I speak no Italian but my google-fu tells me Arrivederci is the more usual ‘bye until we meet again’, while Sparisci means ‘disappear’ as a sort of directed verb, which seems like it would be like a ‘begone’ type of thing.

If I’ve gotten anything wrong, I’m so very sorry and please tell me so I can make the changes.

Edit: Changed the Arrivederci to Addio since I was informed by a commenter that Addio would have been stronger for him to say to them. Addio apparently means 'To God', as in I'll see you again in death.)

 

* * *

 

 

B is for **Breaking point**

 

Therapy was mandated. Not just for her, for everyone, for all that she was the last one to finally be assigned a therapist. No one liked it, not even because it was compulsory but because it touched a nerve in them that they thought they'd hidden deep under the lies they told themselves.She watched her friends, her fellow teammates turn silent, turn inward and Wanda scoffed, even as grew afraid of the haunted spectres her friends were becoming. She wouldn’t let herself become like them she decided.

 

She failed.

 

She’d expected rage, accusations, forced realisations, words put into her mouth.

 

She’d gotten an old woman as her therapist, one who spoke Sokovian. They used words like 'cross-cultural psychology' and 'therapeutic alliance' but Wanda was just glad to hear her language say something other than 'Burn the Witch'.  The woman spoke Sokovian with that tinge of an accent that came from being born and raised in the hills to the South. The man who had run the bakery down the street from theirs had the same accent. He used to sneak buns to her and Pietro when they’d come in with their parents. She hadn’t thought of him in a while. Hadn’t thought of home as anything but that burnt out husk of brick and mortar in a while. What happened to him, she wondered and decided to look him up.

 

She found out. He hadn’t lived in the same part of town as them, the missile hadn’t touched him. But the bakery was gone, and so he had to pack up his things and look for opportunities elsewhere.  He’d found a job working in a kitchen run by a Stark outreach program.

 

She and Pietro had burnt it down on one of the days they’d had off from the HYDRA training. They’d painted ‘Traitor’ across the facade after so they knew why they’d been targeted.

 

The man hadn’t been in the building when they’d set it on fire. He’d only entered it to help a woman who’d been trapped inside but succumbed to smoke inhalation anyway.

 

And Wanda broke.

 

( **Note** : I hate MCU Wanda but she remains my absolute favourite character to write.)

* * *

 

 

C is for **Coloniser**

 

“Why do you call him coloniser?” Sana Rai, one of the many scientists from all over the world who were part of the massive understanding that was creating a planetary defense system, asked Shuri after she’d finished talking in her usual brusque ways to Ryan, one of the interns.

 

The teenager looked at the woman surprised. “You _must_ know why.” She said.

 

Sana knew the child was holding back a scoff. An arrogant socially maladjusted teenager with a high IQ wasn’t exactly something she had no experience with. Every other kid came in with the same attitude, they got broken of it soon enough as they started to deal with ‘adult stuff’ like academic politics. Of course, those kids weren’t royalty.

 

“I know why you call him ‘coloniser’, I know why you use the term,” Although her brother called the Queen, who was actually alive during colonial times, the Queen instead of using that term like her. To be fair, Sana had never heard him call anyone ‘coloniser’ in her earshot, but the idea that she knew someone who might actually do that felt ridiculous. “I’m wondering why _you_ of all people call him coloniser. Wakanda wasn’t colonised. It hid away through all of colonialism. And then through the violent decolonisation. Through all the bloody revolutions that followed. It remained free of all impact, free of all culling of life and culture that their neighbours went through, that all the other colonies went through, my own country one of them. So, why the hell are _you_ calling anyone coloniser?”

 

And only silence was her answer. 

 

 

 

( **Note** :*coughRantcough*

This references fanon Shuri more than movie Shuri. Fanfics in specific have her say that a lot which she doesn’t actually do that much of in the movie as far as I remember.

I don't really dislike Shuri or her fandom. A lot of people have a problem with the 'She's the smartest person in MCU' thing because it discounts a lot of other MCU characters’ intellect and her own background of considerable privilege as a princess with access to vibranium. But I can understand why people love her, because she's written like that. She’s an empty space to project themselves upon because she's a heap of characteristics rather than a character. It always happens with secondary characters because they don't do as many things that people can feel strongly about. It's not surprising and doesn't really bother me. In many ways I feel sorry for her because she's been smart for ages but her innovations don't really make a big difference to people because her reach is limited to Wakanda which is shown to be relatively free of crisis. Even if she has the perfect cure for nerve damage while Tony's made more of a support system/brace thing, because Stark Industries is a thing, he can have those braces help a fuckton more people while she is limited to people within the space of Wakanda.

Having her say coloniser in fanfics though, _that_ bothers me. Maybe it's different for Americans because the colonisation and their war for independence happened a few centuries ago, but for most if not all the other colonised countries it happened in the last century, it's _modern_ history. When I read fics where she calls people 'Coloniser' so casually, I struggle to understand how it's part of her cultural, political or social context when Wakanda was never colonised.)

 


End file.
